These are my PERSONAL views and in no way represent the views of The Washington Post Co.

Friday, September 29, 2006

At DEMOfall 2006 - 4INFOA shot at making 44636 (4INFO's short code) to be the 411 for SMS.

4INFO has opened up the technology to allow service providers to setup a service tied to a unique keyword on the 4INFO Open Platform. The service provider links the keyword to an RSS feed. Users access the information by sending the keyword to 4INFO via SMS. The results are returned via SMS. They have not yet figured out who will get to service the "dictionay" terms. So, the user is left with looking for terms like "dcnews" etc.

This reminds me of the mechanism used by the very successful minitel service in France.

Google and Yahoo will prove to be very tough competitors to beat in the delivery of mainstream information like yellow pages, weather, news, etc. 4INFO has a minority investment from Gannett.